Filed under: Utilities, Video, Windows, Productivity, Open Source
CamStudio is video capture sweetness
by Ryan Carter Aug 23rd 2006 at 1:00PM
CamStudio is a nifty little tool for capturing video on your PC. It is hosted at SourceForge.net, is open source, and free for the downloading. This tool allows capturing the full screen, a region, or a fixed region (which is a region you set explicitly). CamStudio offers many features that are rare among the freeware video apps out there, including screen and video annotations, the ability to use a bunch of different compressions, record/not record audio, allows custom cursor options, and even ships with a AVI to flash converter for your video pleasure. There are several decent screen recorders out there, but none I have seen that offer superior quality for free, that even runs quite well on older hardware. CamStudio is lightweight, quick and dirty, yet has many robust features that will greatly enhance the quality of your video arsenal. If you want to see a good example of what you can do with CamStudio, I used it to make the videos on the Word 2007 Video Review post this morning.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marc Orchant said 1:29PM on 8-23-2006
Too bad they couldn't have been a bit more original with their branding. They basically copied Camatasia Studio's logo and just shortened the first word in their product name. Sounds like a nice tool but sorry - I think it's pretty lame to piggyback on TechSmith's excellent tool and the significant work they've done establishhing their brand like this.
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Alex M said 1:45PM on 8-23-2006
I took a look at the CamStudio homepage and from there linked to http://www.osalt.com (Open Source Alternatives).
You've got to check it out. Apologies if this is old news.
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Robb Topolski said 2:36PM on 8-23-2006
I know a little bit about this. The above site is by a CamStudio fan who appears to be willing to manage further development.
As for TechSmith, I'm not sure which product preceeded which. I don't know their product. CamStudio has been around for several years.
After being sold, someone made an effort to get rid of the open source copies of CamStudio on the internet. They very nearly succeeded.
The buying company released a crippled, non-open "demo" version and then abandoned it. Meanwhile, the fans of CamStudio 2.0 (myself included) scoured their harddrives and eventually recovered all of the pieces. (The source to the codec was the hardest to find.)
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